JUNE 21, 1999:
"Donde están los viejos," asks Compay Segundo. Buena Vista Social
Club, the new documentary directed by Wim Wenders and produced by guitarist
Ry Cooder, begins with a search for old folks. Dressed in a white suit and
clutching his omnipresent cigar, legendary 92-year-old singer and
instrumentalist Compay Segundo patrols the streets of Havana, looking for
anyone seasoned enough to remember the whereabouts of the Buena Vista Social
Club, a members-only club in the East Havana Hills that produced, along with
Segundo, some of the island's greatest and most forgotten players.

The directions he gets are vague at best, and we quickly learn that either the
club has completely vanished or only pieces remain. From that early moment on,
Buena Vista Social Club becomes far more than a documentary; it becomes
both a seductive excavation of an extraordinary group of musicians long buried
in the sounds of memory and a frayed postcard valentine to Havana, a city that
Wenders calls "a disappearing beauty."

The project's roots date back to 1996, when guitarist and veteran global music
prospector Ry Cooder was asked by World Circuit records to fly to Havana to
work on a collaboration between Malinese musicians and old-timer Afro-Cubans.
When visa problems blocked the African contingent's arrival, Cooder stayed on
to work with the "super abuelos," and the result was 1998's Buena Vista
Social Club album, an extraordinary collection of delicate and emotional
sones and boleros that would go on to sell more than a million copies
worldwide, snag a Grammy, and revive the careers of Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer,
Eliades Ochoa, Rubén González, and others.

Wenders entered the picture when he asked Cooder, his friend for more than 20
years, to compose the score for his 1997 film The End of Violence.
During the sessions, Cooder's inability to stop talking about his Cuban sojourn
ignited Wenders's interest in making the trip.

"I had never been to Cuba before," explains Wenders by telephone from his LA
home. "It was like a dream to finally go. What really got me there was Ry
Cooder's enthusiasm for this music and the experience he had when he recorded
the Buena Vista Social Club album and the way he was talking about it
relentlessly and all the stories he told me about these guys. I thought if half
of what he told me was true, I had to see these people. He was so full of the
experience and it was so contagious that eventually I just said, 'Hey, next
time take me with you.' "

So when Cooder went back to Havana last year to record the first solo album of
lulling boleros by the honey-voiced Buena Vista singer Ibrahim Ferrer (whom
Cooder dubs "a Cuban Nat King Cole"), Wenders -- working on one week's notice
-- went along with a cameraman and a sound engineer for a minimalist three-week
Havana shoot. But the three weeks grew into a cumulative year of footage when
Wenders decided to follow the group on tour to Amsterdam and New York City. The
Amsterdam performance produces one of the film's most memorable moments: a
bolero duet between Ferrer and the elegant Omara Portuondo that leaves
Portuondo in tears. In New York, with the specter of the US embargo hanging
over them, the group visit the Statue of Liberty, misrecognize a JFK doll, and
play Carnegie Hall in the film's climactic closing minutes.

Yet for all of Buena Vista's concert footage, the film's true center is
the graceful combination of liquid, video snapshots of Havana -- waves crashing
over '50s cars on the Malecón, an elderly woman smoking an enormous
cigar -- with unassuming excerpts from the Ferrer recording sessions and often
stunning individual portraits of each of the Buena Vista musicians. A
cowboy-hatted Eliades Ochoa sings a guajira about his countryside home while
sitting in the middle of an abandoned railroad yard. Former Arsenio
Rodríguez sideman Rubén González unfolds his warm piano
strolls in a luminous recital hall as young children practice ballet. Portuondo
walks down a Havana street singing "Veinte años" and finds herself in a
duet with an anonymous woman she passes. Bassist Orlando "Cachaíto"
López plucks his instrument in the center of an empty room lit only by
stained-glass windows.

Shooting on Digi-Beta with a SteadiCam, Wenders approaches each musician with
grace and caution -- circling him or her on tiptoes and slowly moving from wide
panoramic shots to gentle close-ups of wrinkled hands and worn matchbooks. It
is a formula that the director parts with only once, when he visits Ferrer in
his small apartment (Ferrer is worried when Wenders is late; he thinks the cops
have picked him up). Ferrer proudly displays his altar to his personal
divinity, Lázaro, and in meticulous detail explains how he lights
Lázaro candles, spritzes him with perfume, and gives him flowers, bee
honey, and his favorite offering, a shot of rum.

"Once I got to know them better, these people really are like characters in a
movie or a play," says Wenders. "The leading players in the band were such
extraordinary people that I wanted to introduce them one by one. I didn't want
to go to Cuba and shoot this music from tripods because I thought it would be
really stiff and academic. I also didn't feel like shooting it hand-held
because that tends to be rather rough and edgy. The music is so elegant that I
thought if I had a SteadiCam I could be constantly moving and it would be
smooth."

Although the film privileges the stories and experiences of the Cuban
musicians, it is openly shot from the outside looking in. And it's the dual
perspective of Wenders and Cooder that, especially in the movie's first half,
structures Buena Vista's narrative direction. Whereas Wenders himself
stays out of the frame (something he didn't do in his two previous "diary"
experiments with documentary, Tokyo-Ga and Notebook on Cities and
Clothing), Cooder is featured prominently. For large portions of the film,
we're reminded of his mediation in the music we're hearing and the people we're
meeting. Early on we see him and his drummer son Joachim cruising the Havana
streets in a motorcycle and sidecar like hipster tropical explorers, and
Wenders can hardly keep the camera from wandering back to Cooder's face during
the group's performances. In one uncomfortable moment during the Amsterdam
show, the band sing the line "Enjoy the real thing" and Wenders cuts to Cooder.
Which does little to quell the debates sparked when the Buena Vista
recording was released last year: how do we understand Cooder's role in
bringing this music to the public? Is Buena Vista Social Club just
another story of cultural brokerage, with Cooder as the white North American
who gives Afro-Cubans the gift of their own music?

Wenders deflects such criticism. "Each of these musicians is thrilled and
extremely grateful to Ry for either the second chance Ry gave them or, in the
case of Ibrahim, the first chance. Anybody who knows Ry and knows his modesty
and knows his love for these people and for any of the musicians he has
rediscovered in the course of his career would know it's a criticism that is
totally obsolete. You'd know it as soon as you would talk to the people
themselves."

More of an issue, when you consider how synonymous Cuba is with its political
history, is Buena Vista's conscious pursuit of visual lyricism over
political content. There are no direct references to the revolution, and
there's no overt discussion of the embargo's role in Havana's decline, though
the impact of both are palpable throughout. Here, as elsewhere in Buena
Vista, Wenders simply hints, offering aesthetically rich, impressionistic
clues: the band flying a Cuban flag from the stage of Carnegie Hall, the
marquee of the Karl Marx Hotel that's missing an R, a story of Che letting
Fidel beat him at golf. Ferrer gets in the film's sole moment of pointed
anti-capitalist sentiment when he remarks, "If we'd followed the way of the
possessions, we'd have disappeared long ago. We have learned to resist the good
and the bad."

In other words, Wenders sacrifices political sloganeering for the loftier goal
of making a film that achieves the state of music. He's the rare director who
listens when he sees; his shots billow and glow like the romantic breeze of a
bolero or shift and roll like the quiet polyrhythms of an old son. In
the end, the music is the film's most enduring character -- its songs and
stories return the musicians who bring it to life to their rightful place in a
history too infrequently told.

"The music comes so much out of experience and out of life," the director
concludes. "It's truly not show business. It's music that they're breathing and
that they need to live. It comes so much from the heart and soul that it's as
elementary as it can be. We often forget how elementary music is."